Issues in Supporting School Diversity: Academics, Social Relations, and the Arts

Supporting diversity in the schools is a shibboleth in education and
even a mandate in some states. But while such support is invaluable,
the odyssey to achieve it is often fraught with danger.

Because the arts are a particularly vibrant means of entering a
culture, offering at once valuable information about their creators,
producers, and audiences, I have been interested in my career in
gauging the impact and potential of multicultural arts education.
Exposure to various esthetics and their sociocultural contexts and
history, I have found, allows a person to see and understand more than
his or her own footsteps. Diverse cultures may have unique and
meaningful ways of expressing universal themes.

Experiencing similarities and differences in these modes of
expression often helps an individual become more skillful and
comfortable interacting with members of diverse groups at work and at
play. Learning about one's own culture usually provides a sense of
identity, roots, and self-understanding; learning about other cultures
stretches the mind and can help dissolve prejudice.

A key problem in this and other approaches to multicultural
education, however, is intracultural variation--diversity within
diversity. Society often puts homogeneous labels on groups that
differentiate themselves. And a cultural designation, in this context,
may become a false or damaging stereotype behind which an individual is
submerged.

Members of a "group" may disagree on what aspects of the group's or
subgroup's culture should be reflected in school, and how. The group's
disagreement may in turn create school-community friction. Given the
richness and abundance of cultural diversity, along with limited time
in school, putting priorities on what receives attention is
unavoidable. When a group lacks a specific, easily identified form of
cultural expression that other groups may have--a dance, for
example--who decides what is appropriate to create and designate as
such, and how?

African-Americans often recognize divisions based on social class,
skin color, region or country of origin, amount of time lived in an
area, gender, age, religion, and kind of racist oppression experienced.
Yet, policymakers often regard them as a homogeneous, unified group
because they are a minority with African roots.

Some African-Americans even view aspects of African-American
culture, such as gospel music, "feeling the spirit" through kinetic
manifestation, and traditional dance genres as esthetically inferior.
In a Philadelphia school, for example, officials banned children's
spontaneous playground dancing, "doin' steps," as "lewd, fresh,
inappropriate for school, disrespectful, and too sexual." Officials in
a Dallas school, on the other hand, had no objection to this kind of
dancing.

The "Hispanic" and "Caribbean" communities of New York City, Miami,
and Los Angeles include both recent immigrants and established families
of Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans,
Nicaraguans, and Puerto Ricans. This diversity, compounded by
generational and life-cycle divisions, reflects a plethora of diverse
music and dance.

A second problem is that, although there is a worthy panoply of
rationales for multicultural education and multicultural arts
education, there is little evidence that specific programs and
approaches do what they are supposed to do. Rationales are based on
such transformations as helping minority students succeed in school,
improving social relations among groups, assisting all students in
reaching their potential, developing respect for diverse but equally
valid forms of expression, avoiding the causes of oppression, and
dispelling stereotypes.

But at least one evaluation has demonstrated the gap between such
program goals and outcomes. Raymond Giles, who coordinated the New York
City African-American Institute's in-service courses on Africa, later
interviewed 15 classes of predominantly African-American students in
grades 4, 5, and 6 in Central Harlem. The students had nine months of
once- or twice-a-week hourly study of African culture and history aimed
at improving their self-image and engendering an appreciation of the
African heritage. In his talks with the students, however, Mr. Giles
found that most expressed the same hostile beliefs and negative
stereotypes about Africa held by the uninformed or misinformed.

It is even possible that exposure to symbols of a cultural group
might evoke a new negativity toward that group--if, for example, the
symbol, perhaps a dance, is disliked, or the previously held negative
associations remain unchallenged.

A third problem is the sometimes antithetical relationship between
preserving symbols of a cultural group, such as the arts, and
socioeconomic mobility. The arts can reflect what is, as well as
suggest what might be. For migrants or immigrants to a new place, their
own group's arts often provide an anchor in a sea of uncertainty,
catharsis, and an emotional ballast for life's travails. Nonetheless,
if the arts are embedded in a low-status, culturally conservative
group, they may ultimately hamper the performers' integration into a
new setting and their socioeconomic mobility. Some researchers, in
fact, criticize multicultural education as a palliative to keep
minorities from rebelling against oppressive systems.

At times, upwardly mobile groups eschew their own cultural esthetic
expression and take on the art forms of the group they wish to emulate
on the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Mexicans in Texas
incorporated beats and patterns of the music and dance of the German
and Polish farmers into their own cross-pollinated Tex-Mex music and
dance. It is often only when people have improved their socioeconomic
situation that they rediscover their earlier cultural heritage.

Because the arts often reflect a group identity and are viewed as
property, a fourth problem in supporting diversity is that an
outsider's appropriation of a cultural group's art form may be
resented, even considered a form of theft or offense. The religious
beliefs among some American Indians, for example, preclude a
secularization of sacred art. Some other groups do not want their
culture to be presented in schools because they want the schools to
"Americanize" their children.

A fifth issue is that good intentions in the use of the arts in
multicultural education may go astray because people are not
sufficiently aware of each other's point of view. Sometimes an art form
may be unrealistically romanticized, symbolize a low-status group, or
have a ritual status. Because people may feel uncomfortable discussing
cultural differences, they may inadvertently offend or hurt each
other.

Recognition of ethnically related artistic diversity itself may
cause problems. Some children do not want to be singled out for what
they are. Recognition for any reason--cultural-group esthetic
expression or academic achievement--may subject them to ridicule and
humiliation. For children in general, fear of being humiliated ranks
high among their concerns.

There are at least three approaches to dealing with these
problems:

Investigating sensitivities and complexities. It is critical to
develop an awareness among educators that cultures are not only
internally diverse but ever-changing. Besides receiving multicultural
training, educators can benefit from learning how to discover the views
and problems of the groups they serve. Moreover, there should be
encouragement for parents, teachers, and students to speak forthrightly
in settings free from incrimination and penalty.

Listening to children's voices about their social world, their
peer-group priorities and pressures, their family and community life,
and the arts is also necessary in order to know how best to help
them.

Balancing assimilation with diversity. It may be wise to provide all
individuals with the opportunity for choice by teaching the skills,
knowledge, and culture that allow a person access to socioeconomic
mobility with the possibility of code switching (being able to operate
in one or another culture at will). In addition, recognizing the
cultural entity that defines what is an American helps avoid enforced
divisiveness.

Evaluation. It is important not only to discover whether programs
intended to support diversity in schools validate their goals, but also
to assess the often surprisingly unintended effects caused by
well-meaning programs.

Research can reveal students' felt and reflective experiences in
response to exposure to different cultures' expressions. Cultural
expressions such as the arts are symbols and, as such, they are a
shorthand and susceptible to distortion. Moreover, symbols and their
meanings change over time in response to environmental forces.

American culture is integrative, incorporative, cross-pollinating,
and amalgamating. Americans have many identities: separate personal
identities, separate cultural identities, and common identities.
Recognition of difference need not become an immutable stone wall to
our country's strength.

Judith Lynne Hanna is an education program specialist in the U.S.
Education Department and a senior research scholar at the University of
Maryland. Her books include Disruptive School Behavior; To Dance is
Human; The Performer-Audience Connection; Dance and Stress; and Dance,
Sex, and Gender. She is the co-author of Urban Dynamics in Black
America.

SUBJ:
Do We Need a National Achievement Exam?
Yes: To Measure Progress Toward National Goals

Education Week
Volume 10, Issue 31, April 24, 1991, pp 36, 28

Copyright 1991, Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.

Do We Need a National Achievement Exam?
Yes: To Measure Progress Toward National Goals

By Thomas H. Kean

Keith Geiger, head of the National Education Association, is against
it. Joe Nathan of the University of Minnesota Center for School Change
opposes it. Even Gregory Anrig of the Educational Testing Service
doesn't like it. With so many clamoring against a national achievement
examination for high-school seniors, why do I support it?

Because we need a reliable way to measure our progress toward the
national goals set by President Bush and the governors. Because
employers need a lot more than the high-school diploma to tell them
what their applicants have learned. And because even as most indicators
tell us that our schools are failing, America continues to spend
hundreds of billions of dollars annually on an enterprise that has
little or no means of accounting for results.

It's time to develop a national achievement exam, required for all
students. Some educators may not agree, but three out of four Americans
do. In a 1989 Gallup poll, 77 percent of respondents strongly supported
requiring schools to use standardized national testing programs to
measure what their students are learning.

Educate America, a group I chair, recently proposed a national
achievement examination for all high-school seniors in public and
nonpublic schools. The exam would measure outcomes in six areas:
reading, writing, math, science, American and world history, and
geography. Individual scores (on a 0-200 scale in each area) would be
mailed to students and their parents, as well as colleges and potential
employers designated by the students. School-by-school and
state-by-state averages would be published, allowing educators and
policymakers to focus attention on clear, unambiguous,
easy-to-understand results.

At least five reasons compel us to pursue a national exam:

Accountability for students. Students not bound for college have
little incentive to work hard in school. They know that prospective
employers are likely to ask only for a diploma, and in many schools,
that sheepskin is more a proof of attendance than a mark of
achievement. But what if students were told that Employer K would be
looking at how much math they have learned, or Employer L how well they
can construct a paragraph?

A national exam with clear, easily understandable results would have
a much more direct impact on job opportunities. It would create an
effort-oriented system with a clear message that hard work pays
dividends and that tough courses are the path to success. A large part
of our efforts nationwide must be to bring that kind of challenging
curriculum to all students, particularly those now tracked into dull
and watered-down courses.

Accountability for schools and states. With results of the test made
public, the $230 billion nationwide education enterprise at long last
would be accountable for results. For the first time in history, a
reliable, commonly accepted indicator of accountability would be
available for every high school in America. Because the results could
be compared across schools and states, decisionmakers at all levels
could pinpoint where changes were necessary. Depending on the results
of these objective indicators, schools could either celebrate success
or focus resources where most needed.

If, for instance, New Jersey schools were excelling in science
instruction but were at the bottom of the barrel in geography or
history, its voters would know. And for the millions of parents who
acknowledge that American education needs fixing but think their own
school is just fine, this exam would finally reveal that there are
problems in Hometown High. Sure, perhaps the mathematics department is
top-flight and the "math olympics" team makes local headlines and wins
awards, but maybe the English program is unacceptably weak. And what
about the sciences? With a national test, at last we would know.

Raised academic rigor. A mandatory national exam could help raise
academic rigor and expectations for all students. While not a
graduation requirement, it would assess what Andrew C. Porter of the
Wisconsin Center for Education Research calls "hard content for all
students." That's a sharp contrast with most state graduation tests,
which assess ''easy content for all students." And placing the exam at
the end of high school gives a resounding answer to the dreaded
classroom question, "Will we have to know this for the test?" Yes, you
will have to know it, not just for the test but for your life. All 12
years in school matter.

Clear results. The results would be understood by every American.
And they would tell us so much more than Scholastic Aptitude Test
scores, which are the most common and the most misused measure of our
schools' progress. First, not everyone takes the sat, which is
especially true of the non-college-bound. Second, the sat is a
prospective test, used to assess the ability to perform college work
and specifically designed to be unrelated to the curricula in our high
schools. Doesn't it make more sense to use a retrospective exam,
focusing on achievement and performance,which can clearly assess what
schools have taught and students have learned?

Quality assessment. If it's true that testing drives curriculum and
teaching, most of today's testing methods are stuck in reverse. They
focus on minimums and rely exclusively on simple multiple-choice
questions, so it's no wonder they lead to poor teaching practices
and irrelevant curricula. It would be a mistake merely to heap one more
such test on the pile. But we don't have to settle for that. As the old
television show, "The Six Million Dollar Man," proclaimed, "We have the
technology ... we can rebuild."

Educate America's proposal would use state-of-the-art assessment
practices and performance measures, including multi-step problems,
essays to determine writing performance, open-ended questions that
require critical thinking, and passages from literature to measure the
ability to read, comprehend, and infer. No doubt, this exam would be
more expensive than fill-in-the-dot tests, but economies of scale would
keep the cost down to $30 per student, or about $90 million nationwide.
That's about 4 cents for every $100 being spent on education in
America.

America's school system isn't working. I salute President Bush and
the governors for pledging to make it work by setting ambitious goals
for the decade. But we will wander toward those goals like the ancient
Israelites in the desert unless we have milestones to mark our progress
and provide direction. Without that 4-cent commitment, without a
mandatory national exam of one sort or another, the promised land of
American educational excellence could be another 40 years off.

Thomas H. Kean, former Governor of New Jersey, is president of Drew
University in Madison, N.J., and chairman of Educate America.

SUBJ:
Do We Need a National Achievement Exam?
No: It Would Damage, Not Improve, Education

Education Week
Volume 10, Issue 31, April 24, 1991, pp 36, 28

Copyright 1991, Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.

Do We Need a National Achievement Exam?
No: It Would Damage, Not Improve, Education

By Monty Neill

U.S. policymakers are besieged with proposals for a national test or
examination system. The plans range from a national multiple-choice
exam to a complex system of exams which are to be calibrated to one
another.

While the examination proposals have significant differences, all
are based on the false premise that measurement by itself will produce
positive change. Recent history shows this is not true: During the
1980's, U.S. schoolchildren became probably the most over-tested
students in the world--but the desired educational improvements did not
occur. FairTest research indicates that our schools now give more than
200 million standardized exams each year. The typical student must take
several dozen before graduating. Adding more testing will no more
improve education than taking the temperature of a patient more often
will reduce his or her fever.

The proposals also share the assumption that the United States needs
a national exam because our education system is failing to produce
workers as skilled as those produced by economic competitors such as
Japan and Germany. Education in this country does need major
improvements, and not just for economic reasons. But neither Germany
nor Japan has a national examination system of the sort being proposed
for the United States. In fact, Germany does not even have a national
curriculum. If these nations provide a better education to more of
their children, it cannot be because they have national tests.

In response to the national-testing proposals, FairTest and over two
dozen major education, civil-rights, and advocacy groups--including the
National Education Association, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the National pta, the National
Association for the Education of Young Children, the American
Association of School Administrators, and the national associations of
elementary- and secondary-school principals--released a statement
urging "the Bush Administration and the Congress to support education
reform by not implementing a national exam at this time." The
organizations agree that mandating a national exam is premature at best
and could lead to deepening educational disaster.

The scope of the potential damage is most clear in the Educate
America proposal. That group seeks to administer a series of six tests
to each high-school senior for $30 per student. It also claims its
tests would be "state of the art" and include performance-based
components. But the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is entirely
multiple-choice, costs $16 for just two tests. At the proposed price,
the Educate America plan would have to be a multiple-choice test.

There can be no doubt that schools would be forced to teach to such
a test. Yet organizing schooling around multiple-choice tests has been
convincingly shown to do great damage to curriculum and instruction.
The harm is greatest for students in the lower tracks whose schooling
often is reduced to "drill and kill" to raise test scores. This method
of instruction virtually guarantees they will not learn higher-order
academic thinking skills.

Examination systems like those proposed by the University of
Pittsburgh researcher Lauren Resnick and Marc Tucker, president of the
National Center on Education and the Economy, do have positive
features. Unlike Educate America, their plan calls for
performance-based exams and would not be one-test-for-all. Its
proponents recognize that we must develop educational standards before
we implement an exam and they seem aware that assessment reform cannot
be implemented without other educational changes, though the actual
proposals fail to address this fact.

Indeed, assessment should be part of school reform--not the
controlling force that national-testing proposals make it. By focusing
on assessment as the solution to our educational problems, we may well
fail to address such critical issues as equity, rigid school
governance, low-quality textbooks and curricula, inadequate schools of
education, and a lack of useful information about school inputs,
processes, and outcomes. To make real use of performance-based
assessments requires creating performance-based schools, which in turn
requires restructuring, staff development, and new educational
materials.

Any national exam system should be based on national standards. The
best current example is the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics' Standards for Curriculum and Instruction. Developing these
standards took several years and involved substantial grassroots
participation. There is no reason to believe standards in other
subjects can be developed more quickly.

Then there is the even bigger problem of developing teachers'
ability to implement the new standards. Teachers do not automatically
know how to teach in a restructured environment, though a great many
are willing to learn. We should build on their willingness, not dump a
new assessment system on them, fail to provide adequate support, then
penalize them and their students for not doing well.

FairTest is also concerned that these examinations could become a
national gatekeeper that continues our nation's unfortunate history of
unfairly sorting students by race and class. Barring additional
changes, it is all too likely that districts will sort students
according to their perceptions of how rapidly students will advance
toward the "certificate of initial mastery" proposed by Lauren Resnick
and Marc Tucker. Such sorting will not spur low-income and
minority-group students to improved achievement.

On any exam, some students who fail should have passed. Experience
shows that students from low-income and minority-group backgrounds will
be disproportionately those who will suffer the negative consequences
of false failures.

Exam proponents often say that they don't want to unfairly penalize
students and that they support "second chance" systems. But why should
we believe that "second chance" programs will be adequately
implemented? We know WIC and Head Start work, but our nation does not
fund them adequately.

Performance-based assessments can be made reliable, sensitive to
potential bias, and even helpful in addressing issues of bias. But work
to assure these assessments are bias-free is only just beginning.

The proposals also leave key questions unanswered: Who will set the
standards, develop the exams, and establish the scoring criteria?
Imposing a national exam could lead, without adequate public
discussion, to a national curriculum and an unelected de facto national
school board that will erode democratic control of education and local
accountability.

We do not even know whether it is feasible to construct such a
national system. The whole process, particularly the calibration of
possibly hundreds of different exams to each other, could prove to be
too expensive and unwieldy to work. When the complexities become clear,
the portfolios and projects necessary for performance-based assessment
could end up being reduced to very limited exams. There could even be a
return to multiple-choice tests, with all their well-known flaws.

Performance-based assessment methods can assess higher-order
abilities and encourage good educational practices. However, we can
move toward the national use of such assessments without constructing a
national examination system. We then gain the advantages of good
assessment and avoid the dangers of imposing a national testing
system.

Assessment reform should be incorporated into systemic educational
reconstruction at all levels. We must begin by defining the kind of
education we want our children to have, including both their daily
experiences and the outcomes society desires. On that basis, we can
determine how to make the changes in curriculum, instruction, school
governance and structure, and assessment required to reach educational
goals far more comprehensive than those enunciated by the Bush
Administration and the governors.

To do that, the pieces of a reform program must be organized into a
coherent whole. Only after we have real experience in implementing the
changes will we have the information necessary to make a reasoned
decision about a national test. Once these reforms have taken hold in
classrooms, schools, districts, and states, there may be no real need
for the expense and complexity of a national exam system.

In the interim, we do need changes in assessment, as we need reform
in all areas of education. For one, states and districts should stop
the incessant, numbing, destructive multiple-choice testing most of
them now engage in. They should develop and implement performance-based
assessments, but do so while changing curricula, instructional methods
and materials, ensuring the staff development of teachers and
administrators required to make it work, and involving parents and
other members of the community in the process.

The federal government should support improvement efforts that
include assessment reform and that build consensus and change from the
bottom up, with guidance--not dictates--from national organizations
such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics or bodies such
as the National Goals Panel. Support for systemic educational reform
would be a far better use of limited federal resources than imposing a
national test or examination system would be.

Education can be dramatically improved over the next decade.
Assessment reform is part of the way to make the changes, but it is not
the magic key. Just testing without ensuring all the other necessary
changes is a prescription for failure, a false short-cut that will
actually undermine education reform. Public education in the United
States can ill afford such an error.

Monty Neill is the associate director of FairTest, the National
Center for Fair & Open Testing, located in Cambridge,
Mass.

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